Comment 13 for bug 1753509

This is one of the most stupid default behaviors I have encountered. Out of the several colleagues and family members who use linux (it is used quite a bit in a university environment), they are ALL (down to the last one) very annoyed at this behavior. The problem is that you have your laptop open, and "Becca" from your calculus class comes in to your office and opens her Macbook, and my laptop adds a printer. Then "Chad" (he's not even in your class) just opens their Macbook in the hallway, and you gain a new printer again. After a couple of months, it is a couple of hundred added printers, though they are all grayed out in the list when trying to print. Even though Chad will never visit the department again, his macbook is in my printer list forever. Just picking one of the actual working printers becomes difficult since it involves scrolling through a long list of gray printers to find the one nongray one in the middle. Deleting them is actually quite annoying to do through the GUI and it is not at all obvious.

I got rid of the browsing feature on my laptop. But not all of my linux-using colleagues are very technically savvy. They are using linux because that's what mathematicians often use, as it has all the software we need. But this is a "feature" that made using linux harder, not easier, for them. It doesn't actually discover the actual department printers at all, you still have to set those up manually.

And I actually think the browsing feature could be useful, but it can't permanently add random configuration just because it appeared on the network at some point. That is not a feature, that is a bug. Plus it is not "browsing" that would mean it is temporary, what it is doing is adding permanent configuration. So the naming is misleading at best. Browsing means that you are looking through the currently available printers. What it is doing is "Harvesting".